The Ice House (16 page)

"You're a mean sod," she mumbled. "Give me 'Tam o' Shanter.' " She opened one eye and glared at him. "I'm dying."

"You've been awake all the time," he accused her.

She opened the other eye and there was a twinkle amidst the confusion. "Was Phoebe here?"

He nodded.

"I remember Phoebe being here. Am I at home?"

"You're in hospital," he told her.

"Oh, shit. I hate hospitals. What day is it?"

"Friday. You've had a two-day snooze."

That worried her. "What happened?"

"I'll find a nurse." He started to get up.

"You bloody well won't," she growled. "I hate nurses too. What happened?"

"Someone hit you. Tell me what you remember."

She knit her brows into a deep furrow. "Curry," she said experimentally.

He gripped her hand tightly. "Can we forget the curry, Cattrell?" he asked her. "It'll be easier all round if you never saw me that evening."

She wrinkled her forehead. "But what happened? Who found me?" He rubbed her fingers. "I found you, but I've had the devil's own job explaining to Walsh what I was doing there. I can hardly admit to carnal designs on a suspect." He searched her face. "Do you understand what I'm saying? I want to stay on the case, Anne. I want justice."

"Of course I bloody understand." Humour danced in the dark eyes and he wanted to hug her. "I can chew gum and walk at the same time, you know." She thought deeply. "I remember now. You were telling me how to live my life." She looked at him accusingly. "You had no right, McLoughlin. As long as I can live with myself, that's all that matters."

He raised her fingertips and brushed them softly across his lips. "I'm learning. Give me time. Tell me what else you remember?"

"I ran all the way back," she said with an effort of concentration. "I opened the window, I remember that. And then"-she frowned-"I heard something, I think."

"Where?"

"I don't remember." She looked worried. "What happened then?"

"Someone hit you on the back of the head."

She looked dazed. "I don't remember."

"I found you inside your room."

A heavy hand descended on his shoulder and made him jump. "You've no business to be asking her questions, Sergeant," said the Sister angrily. "Get me Dr. Renfrew," she called to a nurse in the corridor. "Out," she told McLoughlin.

Anne looked at her with unalloyed horror and clung to his hand. "Don't you dare go," she whispered. "I've seen her picture on
World at War
and she wasn't fighting for the Allies."

He turned and raised his hands in helpless resignation. "Is there anything I should remember?" she asked him. "I wouldn't want to confuse the Inspector."

His eyes softened. "No, Miss Cattrell. You just concentrate on getting better and leave the remembering to me."

She winked sleepily. "I'll do that."

DS Robinson was after promotion. He had gone diligently door-to-door again, looking for leads to Anne's assailant, but he had come up against the proverbial brick wall. No one had seen or heard anything on that night, except the ambulance, and they'd all heard that. He had had another pint with Paddy Clarke, this time under the beady eye of Mrs. Clarke. He had found her immensely intimidating, more so since Anne's revelation that she had once been a nun. Paddy assured him they had looked for the map of the grounds but hadn't found it and, with Mrs. Clarke breathing over his shoulder, he expressed complete ignorance of Streech Grange and its inhabitants. In particular, he knew nothing at all about Anne Cattrell. Nick Robinson didn't press him. Frankly, he didn't rate his chances if he got caught up between Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and he was unashamedly attached to his balls.

There was nothing to stop him going home now. By rights, he was off-duty. Instead, he turned his car in the direction of Bywater Farm and one Eddie Staines. So far, Mrs. Ledbetter's information had paid dividends. No harm in giving her another whirl.

The farmer pointed him to the cow-sheds where Eddie was cleaning up after the evening's milking. He found Eddie leaning on a rake and carelessly chatting up an apple-cheeked girl who giggled inanely at everything he said. They fell silent as Nick Robinson approached and looked at him curiously.

"Mr. Staines?" he asked, producing his warrant card. "Can I have a word?"

Eddie winked at the girl. "Sure," he said. "Would bollocks do?"

The girl shrieked her mirth. "Ooh, Eddie! You are funny!"

"Preferably in private," continued Robinson, making a mental note of Eddie's riposte for his own future use.

"Buzz off, Suzie. I'll see you later in the pub."

She went reluctantly, scuffing her boots through the muck in the yard, looking over her shoulder in the hopes of being invited back. For Eddie, it was clearly a case of out of sight out of mind. "What do you want?" he asked, raking soiled straw into a heap while he spoke. He was wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt which gave full expression to the muscles of his shoulders.

"You've heard about the murder at the Grange?"

"Who hasn't?" said Staines, uninterestedly.

"I'd like to ask you a few questions about it."

Staines leant on his rake and eyed the detective. "Listen, mate, I've already told your lot all I know and that's nothing. I'm a farmhand, a salt-of-the-earth prole. The likes of me don't mix with the people at the Grange."

"No one said you did."

"Then what's the point of asking me questions?"

"We're interested in anyone who's been into the grounds in the last couple of months."

Staines resumed his raking. "Not guilty."

"That's not what I've heard."

The young man's eyes narrowed. "Oh, yeah? Who's been blabbing?"

"It's common knowledge you take your girlfriends up there."

"You trying to pin something on me?"

"No, but there's a chance you may have seen or heard something that could help us." He offered the man a cigarette.

Eddie accepted a light. He appeared to be thinking deeply for several minutes. "Happen I did then," he said surprisingly.

"Go on."

"Seems you've been asking my sister questions about a woman crying one night. Seems you've been back a couple of times."

"The farm cottages on the East Deller road?"

"That's right. Maggie Trewin's my sister, lives in number two. Her man works up at Grange Farm. She tells me you want to know which night this-woman"-he put a derisory emphasis on the word-"was crying."

Robinson nodded.

"Well, now," said Staines, blowing perfect smoke rings into the air above his head, "I can probably tell you, but I'd want a guarantee my brother-in-law'll never know where you got it from. No court appearances, nothing like that. He'd skin me alive if he knew I'd been up there and he'd not give up till he found out who I was with." He shook his head morosely. It's more'n my life's worth." His brother-in-law's young sister was the apple of his eye.

"I can't guarantee no court appearances," said Robinson. "If the prosecution serves a writ on you, you'll have to attend. But it may never happen. The woman may have no bearing on the case."

"You reckon?" Staines snorted. "More'n I do."

"I could take you in for questioning," said Robinson mildly.

"Wouldn't get you nowhere. I won't say nothing till I'm certain Bob Trewin won't find out. He'd kill me, no mistake." He flexed his muscles and returned to his raking.

Nick Robinson wrote his name and the address of the Police Station on a page of his notebook. He tore it out and handed it to Staines. "Write down what happened and when, and send it to me unsigned," he suggested. "I'll treat it as an anonymous tip-off. That way no one will know where it came from."

"You'll know."

"If you don't," Robinson warned, "I'll come back and next time I'll bring the Inspector. He won't take no for an answer."

"I'll think on it."

"You do that." He started to leave. "I suppose you weren't up there three nights ago?"

Staines hefted a lump of dung to the top of his straw pile. "You suppose right."

"One of the women was attacked."

"Oh, yeah?"

"You hadn't heard?"

Staines shrugged. "Maybe." He cast a sideways glance at the detective. "One of her girlfriends did it, bound to be. Bitches fight like the devil when they're roused."

"So you didn't hear or see anything that night?"

Eddie turned his back to attack the farthest corner of the shed. "Like I just said, I wasn't there."

Now, why don't I believe you, Robinson wondered, as he picked his way with distaste through the cow dung in the yard. The apple-cheeked girl giggled as he passed her by the gate then, like a moth to the flame, she dashed back to the cow-sheds and the arms of her philanderer.

Walsh was still nursing a bloody nose when McLoughlin got back to the Station. It had long since stopped bleeding but he persisted in holding his blood-stained handkerchief to it. McLoughlin, who hadn't overheard that part of Phoebe's and Jonathan's conversation, looked at him in surprise.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Mrs. Goode hit me, so I arrested her for assault," said Walsh maliciously. "That soon wiped the smile off her face."

McLoughlin sat down. "Is she still here?"

"No, dammit. Mrs. Maybury persuaded her to apologise and I let her go with a caution. Bloody women," he said. He stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket. "We've had a result on the shoes. Young Gavin Williams turned up an old cobbler in East Deller who does it for pin money."

McLoughlin whistled. "And?"

"Daniel Thompson's for sure. The old boy keeps records, bless him. Writes a description of the shoes-in this case, made a special note of the different coloured laces-what needs to be done, name of owner and the dates they come in and go out. Thompson collected them a week before he went missing." Walsh fingered his nose tenderly. "The timescale's perfect. It's not looking good for Mrs. Goode." He chuckled at his witticism. "If we can find just one person who saw him going into the Grange-" He let the thought hang in the air while he took out his pipe and started to clean it with cheerful industry. "How do you fancy Miss Cattrell for that part? She went through the little pantomime with her solicitor to steer us away from her friend, then panicked her friend by letting on how much she knew." He tapped the pipe against his head. "Goodbye Miss Cattrell."

"No chance," said McLoughlin decidedly, watching the pipe-cleaner turn black with tar. "I dropped into the hospital on my way here. She's come round. I've sent Brownlow down to sit with her."

"Has she now? Did you speak to her?"

"Briefly, before I was booted out by the Sister. She needs a good sleep, apparently, before she can answer questions."

"Well?" demanded Walsh sharply. "What did she say?"

"Nothing much. The whole thing's a complete blank to her." He examined his nails. "She did say she thought she heard something outside."

Walsh grunted suspiciously. "Suits your case rather neatly, doesn't it?"

McLoughlin shrugged. "You're barking up the wrong tree, sir, and if you hadn't tied my hands I'd have proved it by now."

There was malice in the older man's voice. "Jones has taken his team over the ground twice and they haven't found anything."

"Then let me have a look. I'm wasting my time on the Maybury file. No one I've spoken to so far knew anything about his penchant for little girls. Jane appears to be the only one. It's a dead end, sir."

Walsh dropped the fouled pipe-cleaner into his waste-paper basket and glared at his Sergeant with open dislike. McLoughlin's admission that he had been trying to steal a march rankled with him, all the more because his own grip on the case was so tenuous. He was deeply suspicious of the man in front of him. What did McLoughlin know that
he
didn't? Had he found the pattern? "You'll stick with that file till you've talked to everyone who knew Maybury," he said angrily. "It's a whole new line of enquiry and I want it thoroughly explored."

"Why?"

Walsh's brows snapped together. "What do you mean, why?"

"Where will it lead us?"

"To Maybury's murderer."

McLoughlin looked at him with amusement. "She's got the better of you, sir, and there's damned all you can do about it. Raking over dead ashes isn't going to produce a prosecution. He terrorised one child and that was his own daughter, and now he's dead. My guess is he's buried in that garden somewhere, possibly in one of the flowerbeds at the front. She does those herself. Fred is never allowed near them. I think you were right and she hid the body in the ice house till the coast was clear and I doubt very much if, after ten years, there's anything left for us to find. Those dogs of hers are rather partial to human remains."

Walsh plucked at his lips. "I'm keeping an open mind. Webster still hasn't proved to my satisfaction that it wasn't Maybury in the ice house."

McLoughlin gave a derisive snort. "A minute ago you were convinced it was Daniel Thompson. For God's sake, sir, face up to the fact that you've got a
closed
mind on this whole thing. Result, we're all working with one hand behind our backs." He leaned forward. "There is no pattern, or not the sort you're looking for. You're trying to force unrelated facts to fit and you're making a mess of it."

A panic of indecision gripped Walsh's belly. It was true, he thought. There was too much pressure. Pressure from within him to close the Maybury case once and for all, pressure from the media for eye-catching headlines, pressure from above to find quick solutions. And, always, the unrelenting pressure from below as the new bloods challenged for his job. He eyed McLoughlin covertly as he fingered tobacco into his pipe bowl. He had liked and trusted this devil once, he reminded himself, when the devil was shackled to a tiresome wife and troubled by his inadequacies. "What do you suggest?"

McLoughlin, who had been up for three nights in a row, rubbed his tired eyes vigorously. "A constant watch on Streech Grange. I'd suggest a minimum of two in each shift. Another thorough search of the grounds, but concentrated up near the Lodge. And, finally, let's be done with Maybury and put our energies into pursuing the Thompson angle."

"With Mrs. Goode as chief suspect?"

McLoughlin pondered for a moment or two. "We can't ignore her certainly, but it doesn't feel right."

Walsh touched his sore nose tenderly. "It feels very right to me, lad."

Mrs. Thompson greeted them with her look of long-suffering martyrdom and showed them into the pristine but characterless room. McLoughlin had a sense of going back in time, as if the intervening days hadn't happened and they were about to explore the same conversation in the same way and with the same results. Walsh produced the shoes, no longer in their polythene bag, but with the odd meagre dusting of powder where an attempt had been made to bring up fingerprints and had failed. He put them on a low coffee table for her to look at. "You said these weren't your husband's shoes, Mrs. Thompson," he accused her mildly.

Her hands fluttered to the cross on her bosom. "Did I? But of course they're Daniel's."

Walsh sighed. "Why did you tell us they weren't?"

The awful tears swam into her eyes and drizzled over her cheeks. "The devil whispers in my ear." Her fingers fumbled at her shirt buttons.

"Give me strength," muttered Walsh.

McLoughlin stood up abruptly and walked to a telephone in one corner. "Pull yourself together, Mrs. Thompson," he ordered sharply. "If you don't, I shall call for an ambulance and have you taken into hospital." She shrank into her chair as if he had slapped her.

Walsh frowned angrily at his Sergeant. "Are these the shoes Mr. Thompson was wearing when he disappeared?" he asked the woman gently.

She examined them closely. "No," she said.

"Are you sure? You told us the other day he had only one pair of brown shoes and he was wearing them the day he went."

Her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably. "Did I?" she gasped. "How very odd. I don't believe I was feeling quite well the last time you came. Daniel loved brown shoes. You can have a look in his cupboard if you like. He had pairs and pairs." She waved her hand at the table. "No, these are the ones Daniel gave to the tramp."

Walsh closed his eyes. His threadbare case against Diana was disintegrating. "What tramp?" he demanded.

"We didn't ask his name," she said. "He came to the door, begging. The shoes were on the stairs to go up and Daniel said he could have them."

"When was this?"

She produced the lace handkerchief and touched it to her eyes. "The day before he left. I remember it very clearly. Daniel was a saint, you know. In spite of all his troubles he had time for a poor beggarman."

Walsh took some papers from his briefcase and flicked through them. "You reported your husband missing on the night of the twenty-fifth of May," he said. "So this tramp came on the twenty-fourth."

"He must have done," she said through her tears.

"What time was it?"

She looked helpless. "Oh, I couldn't remember that. Some time during the day."

"Why was your husband at home during the day, Mrs. Thompson?" asked McLoughlin, looking at his diary. "The twenty-fourth was a Wednesday. Shouldn't he have been at work?"

She pouted. "His beastly business," she said viciously. "All his worries came from that. It wasn't his fault, you know. People expected too much of him. He stopped going in towards the end," she admitted lamely.

"Can you give me a description of this tramp?" asked Walsh.

"Oh, yes," she said. "He'll be able to help you, I'm sure. He was wearing a pair of pink trousers and an old brown hat." She thought back. "He was about sixty, I suppose, not much hair and he smelled terribly. He was very drunk." She paused, a thought suddenly occurring to her. "But you must have found him already," she said, "or why would you have the shoes?"

Walsh picked them up and turned them over. "You said your husband had no connection with the women at Streech Grange, yet one of them, Mrs. Goode, invested money in his business."

A shadow crossed her face. "I didn't know."

"Mrs. Goode claims to have met you," Walsh went on.

There was a long silence. "Possibly. I do recall talking to someone of that name three or four months ago in the street. Daniel told me she was a client." A glint sharpened in her eye. "Brassy blonde woman, over-dressed, with a come-hither look."

"Yes," said Walsh who found the description inept but entertaining.

"She rang me," said Mrs. Thompson, pursing her lips in disapproval, "wanting to know where Daniel was. I told her to mind her own business." She pinioned the Inspector with a basilisk's glare. "Did she have something to do with Daniel's disappearance?"

"We've been going through your husband's books," said McLoughlin glibly from his corner. "We noted the discrepancy. It puzzled us."

"I didn't know she was one of them." She held her handkerchief to dry eyes. "Now you tell me she invested money in his company?" The floodgates opened and this time her tears were of real distress. "How could he?" she sobbed. "How could he? Such terrible women."

Walsh looked at McLoughlin and stood up. "We'll be off now, Mrs. Thompson. Thank you for your help."

She tried without success to stem the flood.

"Have you thought about going away at all?" the younger man asked.

She gave a long shuddering sigh. "The Vicar's arranged a holiday," she said. "I'm going to a hotel by the seaside at the end of the week, just for a few days' rest. It won't do any good though, not without Daniel."

McLoughlin looked very thoughtful as he closed the door behind him.

Chief Inspector Walsh ground his teeth with fury as he jerked the clutch on his brand new Rover and promptly stalled. "What are you looking so damned cheerful about? We've just lost our only promising lead."

McLoughlin waited until the car was moving. "Who was in charge of the case at the beginning?"

"If you mean Thompson's disappearance, it was Staley."

"Did he do a thorough job? Did he check Mrs. Thompson?"

"Checked everything. I've been through the file."

"Does he know about our body?"

"He does."

"And it hasn't made him suspicious?"

"No. Her alibi's too good. She took Mr. T. to Winchester station where he boarded a train to London. Various people remember seeing him during the journey and one remembers seeing him on the platform at Waterloo. After dropping him off, Mrs. T. went straight to East Deller Church were she took part in a twenty-four-hour fast with other members of the congregation. The saintly Daniel was due to join her there at six o'clock on his return from London where, incidentally, he was supposed to be raising a loan to keep the business afloat. He never came back. At ten o'clock, the Vicar's wife took Mrs. T. home to Larkfield and waited with her while she telephoned office, friends and acquaintances. At nearly midnight, Mrs. Vicar rang the police and stayed with Mrs. T. who was by then quite hysterical, through the night and most of the following day. Daniel has not been since he got off the train in London."

"But her alibi's only good for the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. Supposing he came back later?"

Walsh manoeuvred his way into the traffic on a roundabout. "Why would he, if he'd gone to the lengths of doing the bunk in the first place? Staley reckons he planned to kill two birds with one stone-get shot of the awful wife and duck out of the bankruptcy. He hopped into the bog at Waterloo, reversed his mac, stuck on a false moustache and went to ground with whatever he'd managed to stash away from the business. For what it's worth, Thompson's number two at the radiator firm said he wasn't in the least surprised Thompson legged it, he only wondered why it had taken him so long. According to him, Thompson had no balls and less bottle and from the moment things began to get dicey, he looked like running."

McLoughlin picked at a fingernail. "You must have thought he had a good reason for coming back, sir. Otherwise, how could Mrs. Goode have killed him?"

"Yes, well, Mrs. Goode's a damn sight more attractive than that silly bitch back there. I felt there was a good chance he staged his disappearance in order to throw in his lot with a blonde bombshell."

"But when he turned up on her doorstep, Mrs. Goode, who was down by ten thousand, found she didn't fancy him as much as she thought she did and stuck a knife into him?"

"Something like that."

McLoughlin laughed out loud. "Sorry, sir." He thought for a moment. "The Thompsons don't have any children, do they?"

"No."

"OK, let's say you've been married to a man for thirty-odd years. He's been the be-all and end-all of your existence and he suddenly deserts you." He paused for further thought.

"Go on."

"I'll need to think it through properly but something along these lines. Daniel does a runner because the business has gone down the chute and he can't cope. He hangs around in London for a bit but finds that living off his wits there is worse than facing the music at home, so he comes back. Meanwhile, Mrs. Thompson has discovered, because Mrs. Goode telephones and tells her that Daniel was supposed to have gone to Streech Grange, that her husband has been seeing another woman, worse, a woman steeped in sin. She's very near the edge already and this sends her right over. Bear in mind she's a religious fanatic, her marriage has been a sham and she's had several days to sit and brood. What's she going to do when Daniel comes home unexpectedly?"